Materializing Lost Time and Space: Implications for a Transformed Scholarly Agenda

Summary

The Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project (VSPCP) (https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu/) is a collaborative Digital Humanities Project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that enables us to explore the lived religion of London in the post-Reformation period. By combining visual and acoustic digital modelling technology with recreations of early modern worship using contemporary musical settings of liturgical texts provided by The Book of Common Prayer, the Cathedral Project gives us access to the experience of specific occasions of worship and preaching in St Paul's Cathedral in early modern London.

The visual models achieve accuracy in their depictions of the buildings and spaces inside Paul's Churchyard by combining data from archaeological excavations of the original foundations left by the Great Fire of London (1666) with seventeenth-century measurements of these buildings’ interior dimensions and surviving visual depictions of the cathedral and its surrounding structures. Unlike many digital recreations of lost spaces which show the structures in pristine condition, our renderings of these models incorporate data about the relative ages of different structures as well as the effects of weather, time- and season-governed angles of light, and effects of acidic coal burned for cooking and heating. Acoustic models combine basic dimensions of the visual models with the acoustic properties of the materials used in their construction. Within these models, the Project brings together literary, religious, musical, and cultural histories of that period to recreate festive and ferial worship services using the liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer and music composed by musicians working at St Paul’s, with actors using scripts in original early modern pronunciation and musicians from Jesus College, Cambridge University standing in for their seventeenth-century predecessors.

An Odd Work of Grace

The Cathedral Project also enables us to take a fresh look at worship and preaching in the early modern period because it gives us the experience of worship and preaching scripted by The Book of Common Prayer as they unfold in real time, moment-by-moment, in models of the places in which it originally occurred. We are reminded, therefore, that the most important official documents of the English Reformation are pragmatic rather than doctrinal, concerned with enabling the organization and scripting of public worship rather than the making of dogmatic statements of belief.